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“And last but not least,” Bobby said, tossing another crumpled scrap, “Billy and A
“It’s enough to make you believe in stereo,” Jim said to Dinah.
Bobby wheeled around. “Jim Chopin! As your chopper didn’t fill up my show with a bunch of goddamn background noise, I have to assume you were reduced to driving in.”
“Yeah, I borrowed Billy’s truck.”
Bobby’s eyes widened. “Holy shit! He let you borrow his new Explorer?” He zipped to the window in his wheelchair, which, given the way he operated it most of the time, seemed like it was jet-propelled. Jim stepped nimbly out of the way of the wheels.
It was easy to remember that Bobby was black-all you had to do was look at him-and, as such, part of a minority measured in the single digits in the Park. It was, however, sometimes hard to remember that he had lost both his legs from the knee on down in a Southeast Asian jungle before he was twenty. His personal history was hazy in between his time in a veteran’s rehab clinic and the time he appeared on scene in the Park somewhere around 1978, but whatever he’d been doing in the interim had to have been lucrative, because he’d had enough cash in hand to stake a claim on Squaw Candy Creek, build his A-frame, stock it with enough electronic equipment to keep NASA in business, and buy a vehicle each for air, land, sea, and snow, specially modified, in Bobby’s exact phrase, “to get a no-legged gimp anywhere he wants to go in as short a time as possible.” He was now the NOAA observer for the Park, calling in weather observations twice a day. Other than that, he seemed to subsist on barter and air, a neat trick, since two years ago Dinah had moved in with him, and a year after that, she presented him with Katya. Dinah, a budding videographer, wasn’t pulling in a lot of money herself.
Jim had long ago decided that what Bobby had or had not done before he settled in the Park was none of his business. Bobby drank a lot of Kentucky sipping whiskey, he pirated a little radio wave, and, other than throwing an a
And, Jim had enough of the outlaw in himself to recognize another outlaw when he saw one. “Hey, Bobby.” He doffed cap and jacket and accepted a mug of steaming coffee from Dinah.
“Goddamn, Chopin!” Bobby said, executing a perfect turn on one wheel with no perceptible traveling. Five point nine, all judges. “How the hell did you talk Billy out of his new wheels?”
Jim moved over to one of the couches surrounding the big rock fireplace set between the ceiling-high windows and sank into very deep cushions. “Well, it’s like this.”
Bobby and Dinah listened with absorption, and when he was done, they exchanged one of those glances married people give each other, the kind that exchanges a wealth of information without a word being said, and at the same time casts the uncoupled people in the room into outer darkness. “What?” he said.
“Nothing,” Dinah said, giving Bobby the look, it being another one of the shorthand methods of married communication.
“No,” Bobby said hastily. “Nothing. No wonder Billy gave you his wheels. Anything that brings jobs into the Park makes him happy.”
“Even if other people might not be,” Dinah said sotto voce, as if she couldn’t help herself.
Selective deafness was one of the more useful acquired talents in law enforcement, and Jim practiced it now. “Do you think it’ll work?”
Bobby stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Shit. Why ask us-you’ve already made up your mind.”
It wasn’t a question, and Jim let a grin be his answer. It was a wide grin, one that could and often did, variously, mesmerize, intimidate, terrify, a
As a female down to her fingertips, Dinah had always been relieved that she had seen Bobby first. Especially since she’d never been one for three-way relationships, and it had been clear from the first time she’d met him that any woman sleeping with Trooper Jim Chopin would be sharing that bed with a third person. It was only recently that she had realized that the third person had never changed, and only in the last year that she had learned to see Jim Chopin as a man instead of a caricature Don Juan. “Hungry?” she said to him. “I was just about to fix us some lunch.”
He smiled at her, and she had to repress the instinctive urge to take a step back. Or maybe forward. “Sounds good to me.”
They sat down to moose salad sandwiches and ate to the accompaniment of Katya banging her spoon against the tray of her high chair, scattering pureed moose salad all over Bobby’s black T-shirt. “Goddamn!” he roared, dabbing ineffectually at his chest. “That’s the second shirt today. I thought we was only supposed to be going through diapers by the dozen around here.”
“Goddamn!” Katya said, and banged her spoon again.
“Goddamn!” Bobby said, a huge grin on his face. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes,” Dinah said.
Bobby saw Dinah’s expression and whispered to Katya, “Bad word, honey. Mommy pissed off. We’ll talk later.”
Katya laughed, a gurgled baby chuckle, and held out her arms. Her father swooped around the table and scooped her out of her chair, tossing her up in the air. Conversation deteriorated into Park gossip. Had they but known it a rehash of a similar conversation held not twelve miles down the road the night before, only Bobby had a lot more appreciation to express for Bernie’s new barmaid. Dinah gave him a halfhearted swipe and he tucked Katya beneath one arm and scooped Dinah up in the other for a humming, prolonged kiss, which Jim observed with professional approval.
Dinah emerged from the embrace blushing, breathless, and laughing, and Bobby, satisfied, said, “She’s a beauty, but cold.”
It took Jim a moment to realize that Bobby was talking about the new barmaid. “Oh yeah? What, she said no to you?”
“Cheese it,” Bobby hissed, jerking his head at Dinah.
“Sorry.”
“I’ll say. I don’t know, I just don’t warm up to her is all. She takes advantage. Dan walked into the Roadhouse the second day after she got there, and as soon as she got his job description, she made a beeline straight for him. Guy didn’t have a chance.”
“Poor guy,” Jim said.
Bobby looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Up yours, Clark.”
Bobby gri
Jim ticked down a mental list. “You, George, Billy, Auntie Vi. I think I’ll head out to Bernie’s, see what he says.”
“Give my love to the new girl in town,” Bobby said, and caught a wet sponge upside the head. “That does it, woman. Now it’s war!”